Facebook tests having users initiate Safety Check

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is experimenting with letting users, not company staff, initiate Safety Check during a natural disaster or terrorist attack.

In coming weeks, the giant social network will test a version in which users can notify loved ones that they are safe and send an invitation to friends in the area to do the same rather than relying on a team of engineers to pore over real-time data on international crises to pinpoint the ones that merit a Safety Check activation.

"This way the community spreads the safety check and promotes it, instead of Facebook itself doing this top-down broadcast," says Peter Cottle, lead engineer on Safety Check. "I think this is really exciting to have the community really be the ones. Talking about it triggers the initial prompt and then they check on their friends."

Getting users more involved could increase how frequently Safety Check is deployed. It could also defuse criticism that dogged Facebook after November's terrorist attacks in Paris.

That was the first time Facebook activated Safety Check for a "human disaster," prompting questions about how the company decides when to use it and why it had not been activated following suicide bombings in Ankara, Turkey and Beirut, Lebanon. Before Paris, the feature had been turned on five times, following earthquakes in Afghanistan, Chile and Nepal and tropical storms in the Philippines and South Pacific.

The controversy prompted soul searching at Facebook, which found itself in the uneasy and deeply political business of determining what constitutes a tragedy. Facebook says it weighs three criteria before activating Safety Check: the scope of the crisis (how many people affected), the scale of the crisis (political and economic instability, crumbling infrastructure) and the duration.

"You are right that there are many other important conflicts in the world," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote after the Paris attacks in a comment on Facebook. "We care about all people equally, and we will work hard to help people suffering in as many of these situations as we can."

The controversy was also a reflection of how vital and effective the crisis communications tool has become in less than two years.

Safety Check lets people with one click let family and friends know they are out of harm's way. How it works: Facebook pings users in the affected area asking them to update their status on Facebook. Friends can also mark other friends in their network as safe.

Since its first activation in December 2014 for Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines, more than 1 billion people have received news of a friend being marked safe, according to Facebook.

It's a far cry from Safety Check's scrappy beginnings as a disaster message board built by a Facebook engineering team in Tokyo to help people communicate in the wake of Japan's 8.9-magnitude earthquake in 2011 that set off a devastating tsunami.

Facebook's Safety Check feature(Photo: Facebook)

"During that crisis we saw how people used technology and social media to stay connected with those they cared about," Facebook wrote when introducing the service.

Safety Check is now tucked under the wing of Facebook's "social good" team run by longtime Facebook employee Naomi Gleit and created at Zuckerberg's behest, part of a broader effort at Facebook to embrace the causes of its 1.6 billion users.

Among the initiatives the team is working on: AMBER alerts to find missing children, broader deployment of the "Donate Now" button used to raise money for ALS during the Ice Bucket Challenge and following last year's earthquake in Nepal that killed 8,000 people, and hosting fundraisers on Facebook for non-profits. The goal, Gleit told Mashable in September, is "to understand how people are already using Facebook for good, identify ways we can amplify that and make it easier, and then execute by building products."

Safety Check is one of the team's flagship products.

Over the last few months, Facebook has made it easier to launch the service so it can be activated more frequently and faster, says Katherine Woo, product manager for Social Good team. Facebook has beefed up the product to more ably handle larger events. Trained employees, not just engineers, can now deploy Safety Check. Full translations in languages around the world are now available more quickly.

And Facebook is working to make it easier for affected communities to identify crises and initiate Safety Check. So far this year, Facebook has activated Safety Check 17 times, from an earthquake in Ecuador to a bridge collapse in India, far more than the 11 times in 2014 and 2015.

"We want to make sure the tool is useful and relevant, because ultimately we want to provide relief to loved ones," Woo said.

How Safety Check works:

When the tool is activated after a disaster and you’re in the affected area, you receive a Facebook notification asking if you’re safe. Facebook determines your location by looking at the city listed in your profile, your last location if you’ve opted in to the Nearby Friends product and the city where you are using the Internet. If Facebook gets your location wrong, you can mark that you’re outside the affected area.

If you’re safe, you can select "I'm Safe" and a notification and News Feed post will be generated. Your friends can also mark you as safe.

If you have friends in the area of a natural disaster and the tool has been activated, you will receive a notification about those friends that have marked themselves as safe. Clicking on this notification will take you to the Safety Check bookmark that will show you a list of their updates.